Faster, better, newer. It is all change in telecoms in the coming years. With 5G now gearing itself up to roll out in European countries and RCS starting to gain some traction, the world of telemedia is poised for another big shift. But what will it deliver?
New research from Barclays Corporate Banking shows that 5G could supercharge the UK economy by up to £15.7bn per year by 2025 – but the opportunity could be missed because industry leaders still do not know enough about the benefits of investing in the technology.
It may cost a fair bit to roll out, but it could well totally change telecoms. For starters, the leap from 4G to 5G is not going to be like the incremental improvements to bandwidth and speed we saw with the move from 3G to 4G – 5G is going to create a whole new paradigm in telecoms speeds.
The technology is not only broader and faster, it also adds the sophistication of ‘network slicing’, which allows for the same bandwidth to effectively be sliced up to carry even more traffic and ever faster speeds. It is going to up the gears of what is possible over the network by an unparalleled degree.
While this is happening, the radio frequencies used older mobile services are also going to be redeployed, opening up connectivity for IoT also to an unprecedented level.
Between them, these two things, are going to revolutionise the world consumers live in over the next five years.
Everything will be connected and those things that need speed – content services, remote surgery, remote gaming and more – will all be near instant.
And this opens up a huge new world for telemedia. Not only will new content services come along that make the most of these new speeds and bandwidths, but they will create new business opportunities.
Interactive mobile gaming is set to be one of the examples of this. People will be playing interactive games with new levels of augmented, virtual and mixed reality on their mobiles while out and about. And they will pay.
While the network services delivered may be 5G and futuristic, it will be carrier billing that sates the need for instant gratification with these services.
While DCB is growing around ticketing, transport, parking, gaming and ‘edu-tainment’ apps today, these are but the start. 5G will bring in so many new digital services that with rich content all of which will be microbilled. This is where DCB really comes into its own.
Yes, there are people detracting DCB’s efficacy for subscription services, but I maintain that 5G will usher in a range of services that will be all about instant digital gratification – and which will be microbilled.
Media content, games, services and information, ticketing and more will all be driven by this. But they won’t be subs services, they will be pay as you go offerings. For the dedicated user, there will be the opportunity to subscribe, but again this won’t just use DCB.
I also believe that, as 5G comes into its own and these services become mainstream, so too will DCB to pay for them. This will have two advantages: firstly, it will drive up use of DCB and, secondly, it will make DCB accepted and understood by the public.
As I mentioned last time, part of the DCB problem is that it is an ideal payment tool for instant gratification, but it is used for subs services, which aren’t instant gratification – how can they be? They go on and on… it is an oxymoron.
People sign up – the instant gratification part – but then change their minds when it repeats. This is what they are really complaining about and it is this that gives DCB a bad name.
5G will, I believe, go a long way to stopping this and changing attitudes.
